We haven’t seen the last of Nick Kouvalis

If Nick Kouvalis didn’t exist in Canadian politics at this particular time in the country’s history, we might have had to invent him.

The now-ex campaign manager for Conservative leadership contender Kellie Leitch had become the personification of Donald Trump-style politics, imported to Canada, just in time for 2017. Whenever pundits and politicos were wondering whether Trump’s brand of politics could work in this country, Kouvalis was held up as the example.

Why was Leitch railing against “elites” and pushing for values testing on Canadian immigrants? How did Leitch end up with an early lead in fundraising in the Conservative leadership race? The answer always revolved around the dark arts of master strategist Kouvalis, and the inspiration he was drawing from Trump.

Kouvalis even seemed to be borrowing a page from the American president with his over-the-top Twitter rants and circulation of fake news — which turned out to be his undoing, in part.

Duke, like Trump himself, is almost a caricature in current American politics. To be clear, Kouvalis is not. The fact that he acknowledged the harm he was doing to Leitch’s campaign — and his own reputation — suggests at least a small measure of the self-restraint that many in the American right lack entirely.

“It has become clear that I have become a distraction to the campaign,” Kouvalis wrote on his Facebook page on Thursday evening. “When a member of a campaign team becomes the focus of media coverage, the time comes to resign.”

This isn’t the first time that Kouvalis has hit the brakes on crazy. Though he was one of the architects of Rob Ford’s mayoralty victory in Toronto in 2010, he had bailed from his role as chief of staff by 2011.

Kouvalis’s resignation will be hailed as a sign that Trump-style politics doesn’t work here, that the alt-right demons have been driven out of Canadian public life. Sorry, but that’s just way too simple.

“I found myself not able to run the office, and I found that my advice wasn’t taken,” he told Toronto Life magazine in a 2014 interview. He would actually end up working against the Fords to get John Tory elected as mayor. “When we found out about the gangs and the guns, that was when I decided I wasn’t going to be working for them (the Fords) again,” Kouvalis said in that same interview.

Kouvalis didn’t really hit the national radar until late 2011, when his polling firm, Campaign Research, was conducting misleading phone calls in the Montreal riding of Liberal MP Irwin Cotler. The calls hinted that Cotler was planning to resign from politics (which he did do, but not until three years later.)

The calls were officially condemned by the Commons Speaker as “reprehensible” and led to official censure by the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association, which previously had awarded laudatory stars of approval to Campaign Research.

In the heat of that controversy, Kouvalis sat down in a TV studio for an extremely interesting interview with Scott Reid, a former communications director for Prime Minister Paul Martin. At the time, Reid was co-host of a CTV politics show called National Affairs. (The other co-host was iPolitics’ own Tasha Kheiriddin.)

Kouvalis seemed keen for Reid to like him, trying to get him to admit that they were both boisterous, fun-loving political players. He was alternately deferential and boastful: “We’re in the business of getting Conservatives elected and ending Liberal careers. We’re good at it,” Kouvalis said.

Not long after that encounter, I met Kouvalis at a Manning Centre conference in Ottawa. Contrary to his dark-wizard, evil-genius reputation, he was friendly and charming. We spoke about his hometown of Windsor. I’d written two books about Windsor-born politicians (Shaughnessy Cohen and Paul Martin) and Kouvalis and I knew a lot of the same people.

At the time, I was also in the midst of writing my last book, Shopping For Votes, and Kouvalis would end up being one of the Conservatives who helped me understand the party’s modern marketing apparatus and how it was using big-data politics. We chatted a bit also through the years about his role in Christy Clark’s surprise election victory in B.C. and ongoing Conservative developments in Ottawa. In fact, Kouvalis’s name appears in the acknowledgements of Shopping For Votes, as thanks for the help he offered.

So this is why I sat up and took notice when he surfaced as Leitch’s campaign manager last year. Kouvalis is not to be underestimated. Though Leitch seemed an unlikely spokesperson for the type of populist politics that Kouvalis has favoured in the past (she’s no Rob Ford), I wondered whether he was working more moderately and temperately behind the scenes, as he had with Clark and John Tory. And though Leitch’s declarations about values-testing were objectionable to me, I wondered what Kouvalis was seeing in his research. He hasn’t always been correct in his soundings of the Canadian electorate, but the upset in American politics in 2016 was a big lesson to all of us in the political bubble about the need to pay attention to what’s going on outside it.

But Kouvalis, in recent weeks, seemed to have decided he’d be the voice of outrage and outrageousness in the Conservative leadership race. He unabashedly bragged on Twitter that he had circulated fake information a few weeks ago “to make the left go nuts.”

That same left may be going nuts today, celebrating his exit from Leitch’s campaign and John Tory’s statement putting some miles between himself and his former campaign strategist. It will be hailed as a sign that Trump-style politics doesn’t work here, that the alt-right demons have been driven out of Canadian public life.

Sorry, but that’s just way too simple. Whatever Kouvalis was seeing out there on the ground in Canada, whatever emboldened him to become the symbol of Trump’s imports to Canada — it still exists.

If there’s any lesson in Kouvalis’s rise and fall, it lies in the dangers of caricature. Don’t be too hasty to draw caricatures — and don’t become one.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

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Susan Delacourt is one of Canada's best-known political journalists. Over her long career she has worked at some of the top newsrooms in the country, from the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail to the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post. She is a frequent political panelist on CBC Radio and CTV. Author of four books, her latest — Shopping For Votes — was a finalist for the prestigious Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Canadian non-fiction in 2014. She teaches classes in journalism and political communication at Carleton University.